1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the reliability of avionic systems and more particularly to a method and a device for monitoring avionic systems connected to a shared medium.
2. Discussion of the Background
The reliability of avionic systems is at the center of the concerns of aircraft designers. It generally is acknowledged that a redundancy of the key equipment items of aircraft is necessary in order to ensure the required functions despite the failure of one system as well as in order to compare the performance of the systems and to rapidly detect a possible failure.
The use of computer systems in aircraft has led the designers to implement computer networks for the transmission of information items and commands among the operational systems. The computer networks here are considered to be shared communication media used to exchange data. The capacity of these media is determined by the characteristics of the transmitted data, in particular their volume and their speed of transmission.
In particular in order to meet the increase in the number of transmitted data and the required transmission speeds, it can prove necessary nowadays to use active components in the computer networks, for example switches. The use of active components makes it possible to optimize transfer of the data according to the parameters linked to these data such as their nature and according to the state of the communication network, in particular its load.